If you're an AT&T customer, you can have a free cup of coffee (or anything else from Starbucks that costs less than five dollars) on Ting. The budget-focused MVNO is offering a $5 gift card to AT&T users just for checking to see if their current phone is compatible with the service. Head to this address, enter your phone's IMEI number to check if it's compatible, enter your phone number (to make sure it's an AT&T account), then give them your email address to get your gift card.

AT&T is almost ready to launch a new feature that ties together multiple devices under one phone number. The feature is currently called NumberSync, and the carrier expects it to launch on a single device (weird) very soon. More devices will launch later this year, making the feature actually useful.

Did you know that if you email T-Mobile's John Legere you can actually get a reply from the CEO's staff or even John himself? This is decidedly not the case with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. In the latest PR blunder for the carrier, a customer who emailed Stephenson with a few suggestions was shut down by AT&T's chief intellectual property counsel. Yes, AT&T lawyer'd their own customer for sending an email.

Do you know what costs more than a Galaxy Note 5? This year's new Galaxy S6 Edge+, which is essentially a Note with fancy sides. Both are priced at uncomfortably close to a grand. Frankly, Galaxy Note devices are about as expensive as smartphones come.

As if there was any doubt, both the LG Nexus 5X and the Huawei Nexus 6P, introduced today at Google's yearly Nexus event, will be compatible with Project Fi. That makes them just the second and third phones (after the Nexus 6 from last year) to be available on Google's combination Wi-Fi/LTE mobile virtual network, which uses both the T-Mobile and Sprint networks as a backbone. Fi switches rapidly between T-Mobile, Sprint, and Wi-Fi (VOIP) for data and calls, and that little extra functionality means that conventional smartphones need not apply.

After a very long wait for owners of the AT&T variants of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, they are finally getting updated to Android 5.1.1. This is in large part due to the upcoming launch of Samsung Pay on September 28th. Most other current generation Samsung devices needed some updates to be prepped for Samsung Pay and most carriers have issued them over the past day or so.

AT&T owners are the only ones who are being brought up to date from Android 5.0.2, which is why the updates are roughly 670 megabytes.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which carriers release updates for their Android updates first, and once you stray outside of the shallow waters of flagship smartphones, things start to get really inconsistent. For example, AT&T is updating its carrier-specific version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 8.0 to 5.1.1 today, at least according to this support page. But at the same time, Sprint's Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 is only just now getting upgraded from Android 4.4 to 5.0. Huh.

AT&T's Tab 4 8.0 update includes changes to the Quick Settings menu, but not much else on top of the usual changes.

AT&T's prepaid service is set to expand its budget offerings this week with the ZTE ZMAX 2. As the name implies, this is the followup to the original ZMAX . Like its predecessor, the ZMAX 2 tries to offer some more premium features while keeping the price reasonable. This one is even cheaper, though.

We like to (deservedly) give AT&T a lot of grief around here, but it looks like they have a case in their latest lawsuit. According to the legal documentation, AT&T has evidence of several employees having engaged in a scheme to illegally obtain unlock codes for AT&T customers that were still under contract. Why would they do that? Well, the lawsuit alleges they were taking money from Swift Unlocks, a web-based company that charges a small fee to unlock people's carrier smartphones.

The nearly-defunct two-year contract model that all carriers once used was built on the premise of making top smartphones more affordable up front.